1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the fields of Internet based computer implemented methods and computer implemented systems for community collaboration. For the purposes of this patent application, a community collaboration software includes any form of collaboration software including without limitation bulletin board, forum software, wikis, blogs, chat, white boards, e-learning software, desktop sharing, file sharing, social media software and social networking software.
It further relates to the creation of an on-line market for the purposes of authoring and distributing expertise.
2. Description of Related Art
It is known in the art to provide collaboration software for groups of individuals to create and share information, interact with each other through the software and generally use the software to achieve an individual or group objective. Generally these systems store the collaboration for future reference and further discussion or collaboration.
These existing systems have a number of limitations:                (a) Substantial barriers to entry—there is no efficient automated technique for extracting pre-existing information sources, either legacy, proprietary, database, xml or within the framework itself and perpetuating that access to serve as the basis for community discussion and collaboration;        (b) There is no actionable capability for the most part other than, post, reply, ratings, subscriptions and digest. Consequently they are boundless systems that don't serve the discreet management functions of decisions, actions, budgets, score-carding and assessment;        (c) There is no technique or process for providing expert based communities with the ability to provide alternative interfaces and controls for authors, assessors and beneficiaries of expertise and serve all audiences in one framework;        (d) There is no capability to provide syndication of expert content conveyed in an assessment model to subscribing forums with controls for opt-in, content inclusion and exclusion;        (e) There is no capability to start discussion with a discussion thread creation capability through email with multiple participants and the ability to redirect that to a central discussion forum or wiki;        (f) There is no capability to provide an infinite organizational capability to discussion and collaboration while still providing an infinite number of plug-in capabilities with propagation of plug-in functionality from any of level of category of discussion to all child categories and topics; and        (g) There is no capability to define and determine the mood around areas of discussion other than to print or view traditional metrics and statistics.        
Accordingly, there have been long felt needs for some solutions that address at least one or more of the aforementioned limitations.